John Derbyshire submits an excellent piece on how Islam itself is not the problem, but how how the Islamic texts are being used by the Wahhabis and others who seek Jihad against the West and Jews.
All I am saying is that I don't see that the backwardness, cruelty, ignorance and intolerance of the Arab world, or Pakistan, or Iran, follow necessarily from Islam.
I don't feel sure, in fact, that the teachings of a religion have any necessary consequence for the destinies of believer communities. Steve Sailer has remarked that if a Martian's entire knowledge of the world came from reading the Bible, he would be bound to deduce, after hearing the thundering, angry voice of the Old Testament Jehovah, and reading of the conquests of Joshua, Gideon and David, followed by the gentle words of Christ and St. Paul, that those warlike, fighting Jews must have been kicking around the meek, cheek-turning Christians for the last 2,000 years. This is not... exactly what has been happening.
Texts are never as important as the attitudes people bring to them. It is a commonplace of political science — I think Aristotle noticed it — that a state may have a very democratic constitution, and yet be a tyranny, or vice versa.
If you actually study the development of Islamic law, you can find a myriad of promising routes that the Islamists have walled off in their efforts to shape Islam into tool for exploiting social instability and Western dominance. These paths are there for humanistic, pluralistic Muslims to embrace - when the fever of Islamism breaks. It is critical that non-Muslims not play into their assigned roles in the Islamist passion play - and instead embrace those Muslims who do not read war and hatred as the main lesson of their sacred texts.
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